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Editorial: RAISE act raises red flags

If the RAISE Act had to do only with giving Alabama teachers a salary hike, we’d be all for it.

As proposed by Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston, the Rewarding Advance in Instruction and Student Excellence Act could indeed put extra dollars in some educators’ pockets.

They deserve it, having labored since 2008 with only one two percent pay raise, and even that was largely nullified by increased health care and retirement costs extracted from paychecks.

But Marsh’s proposed bill, not yet finalized, comes with any number of bad ideas that won’t encourage more skilled professionals to enter or stay in the classroom.

As the Montgomery Advertiser’s Brian Lyman reported, drafts of RAISE call for changing teacher tenure, adding a nontenured compensation track for new hires and any current teachers who opt into it.

Teachers don’t really have tenure, as in an assured job for life, and bad teachers can already be fired for cause. What teachers do have, under the current system, is some amount of due process protection against being fired for no reason, or for political reasons. Asking educators to give up those needed protections for a potential bonus or slightly higher pay level is an insult.

There may be some merit to the idea of paying teachers who choose to work in struggling schools in impoverished counties at a higher rate. But the real answer to improving such schools is to better fund them so they can buy textbooks and technology and repair crumbling buildings. That, however, would likely require serious legislative reform of Alabama’s unfair property tax system, a sacred cow Marsh and others refuse to touch.

Then there are proposed changes to how teachers would be evaluated under RAISE, starting in 2017-2018. Marsh has most recently said his bill, when introduced, won’t tie teacher pay to performance judged by standardized testing – or at least won’t too heavily rely on such measures. We hope that’s true and doesn’t change in the legislative process. Giving too much weight to test scores encourages a robotic, teaching-to-the-test approach to education that serves students poorly.

Over-reliance on high-stakes testing in teacher evaluations also crowds subjects beyond math, science and reading out of the classroom. History, the arts, foreign language offerings, physical education – courses where student achievement is harder to quantify by filling in dots on a test sheet for a computer to grade – too often get scrapped.

And too many dollars that should go to support schools, teachers and students get thrown at highly profitable testing companies whose lobbyists are great pals with political leaders.

Many improvements are needed to public education in Alabama, but the RAISE Act raises too many red flags and has rightly alarmed state educators.

Marsh should scale back his ambitions and concentrate on getting better funding to all Alabama classrooms and rewarding teachers for their dedication and service.